JHFweek1Notes

Notes on Week 1 class, readings and topics

Class outline

Introductions (JHF and JM, go around the room)

Welcome and about the course, overall narrative (JHF)

Mechanics and logistics, use of the blog (JM)

Discussion: questions about digital scholarship/digital humanities (JM and JHF)

• how have you used digital resources in your research?
• what does your typical works cited list look like?
• what kinds of information have these sources provided you with?
• do digital sources feel or work or seem different from printed sources? if so, how?

Discussion: Manovich

Discussion: Encyclopedia of Chicago

• Is it public?
• Is it humanities?
• Is it scholarship?
• Is it digital?

Assignment 1: choose a site, do a close reading of it

Manovich

NB production vs. distribution when thinking about what "computer-mediated" means; LM argues that computer mediation (unlike printing and photography) affect the entire communication structure

NB distinction between "computing" and "media technologies" (that is, positioning "computing" with an emphasis on literal computation rather than on information manipulation, which would bring these two much closer together, conceptually). We could come at these two historical trajectories from another angle and understand Babbage's invention as being about representation of information in a manipulable way; that is, in a way that separates it from the human operator; and similarly we could understand the daguerrotype as a medium of representation that externalizes visual information and also makes it susceptible to manipulation. The important advance that each of these represents, in other words, isn't the ability to compute or to perform visual representation; both of these were possible before. It's rather that each technology mediates information in ways that lead ultimately to the point of convergence that is visible to LM. (And in fact he makes this point himself later, observing the similarity of cinema film reels and computer tape.)

His proposal that movie theaters were an essential "survival technique" for subjects of modern society because the information environment outside the theater is too "dense" seems silly and hysterical. The idea that the human brain is being overwhelmed is a self-serving Romantic myth. In fact what we observe is that the human brain is highly adaptable; it's at least as plausible that the movie theatre satisfies a *craving* that is produced by the information density of the modern world.

Questions from Manovich:

• Issues of audience: what would it mean (if he's correct) to say that in a hypermedia or new media interface "every ...reader gets her own version of" the work or text or object? What does ownership mean here and what impact does it have on a reader's sense of self, of the object, of the reading community? What impact does this model of ownership have on reading communities?
• NB his point about feedback (part of the variability principle): how do/could public humanities and scholarly resources make use of feedback mechanisms, and what do they do with them? (constitute objects? constitute audiences? constitute knowledge?)
• Issue of versions: he emphasizes the "different, potentially infinite versions" of a new media object (36); think about what kinds of versions these are. Are they different versions of the object? Different states of the object? Different objects? What impact on our ideas of reading (esp. as constitutive of communities) does this variability have? e.g. can we say that we've read the same thing, in a useful sense? What does an audience share of an object that they've each read in different versions?
• What are his chief blind spots? what is he trying to prove? What is his vision of the new media universe and its audiences and mechanisms of communication?